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He was a singular sensation on Broadway, but in Canada, you could make that a triple.

Marvin Hamlisch died in Los Angeles on Monday after a sudden illness at the age of 68. He won Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, created songs like “The Way We Were” and shows like A Chorus Line, but to one 16 year-old boy from Newmarket, he was simply “someone who believed in me at a time in my life when I needed that very much.”

John-Michael Scapin was the first winner of Triple Sensation, the CBC-TV reality series that offered scholarships in the performing arts to outstanding young Canadian performers.

Thanks to Triple Sensation, Scapin has just finished studying theatre at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. But when he met Hamlisch in 2007, “I was so young, so green, so scared that I took any advice he gave me. And it’s all proven to be good advice.

“It’s nice to have someone believe in you with a fierceness that’s matched only by your parents and to have them keep on believing in you five years later,” Scapin said.

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Cynthia Dale, Stratford Shakespeare Festival star and one of Hamlisch’s fellow judges on Triple Sensation, said he “was really smart with the kids. He was musical theatre royalty, so he knew just what to teach them about the joy of what this is, but the tough work ethic you needed as well.”

Hamlisch composed more than 40 film scores, including Sophie’s Choice, Ordinary People, The Way We Were and Take the Money and Run. He won his third Oscar for his adaptation of Scott Joplin’s music for The Sting. His latest work came for Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!

With files from The Associated Press

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